


Weeping Grave (I do not sleep)

by CopperLeaf



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dad grieves his son but his son comes back, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sappy, infinity war fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 14:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17427599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperLeaf/pseuds/CopperLeaf
Summary: Tony grieved Peter. And then he came back.(Inspired by Mary Elizabeth Frye’s poem, Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep)





	Weeping Grave (I do not sleep)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this not long after Infinity War came out and I saw it for the first time, so forgive me if it’s a teensy bit canon divergent from what the Russo brothers have confirmed about various character dusts. It’s also a sappy mess but I had just seen Spider-Man die on screen, so I was a bit of a mess myself.

_Do_ _not_ _stand_ _at_ _my_ _grave_ _and_ _weep_. _I am not there. I do not sleep._

Grief and Tony were very good friends. They bumped into each other fairly regularly in places he didn't expect. He would grieve his parents at parties in college, he would grieve Yinsen in the grocery store, and now he grieved Peter on this abandoned rock somewhere in space.

Alone.

Nebula left him there almost immediately after Peter fell apart in his fingers, possibly off to die. Tony let her go. Even when he made his way back to Earth when Thor tracked him down in a bifrost beam accompanied by a bitingly angry talking racoon, he was still alone.

Once it was clear that Tony was the only survivor, he watched Rocket pound his little fist into Titan's soil, screaming a string of curse words in the name of Quill, Gamora, Drax, Mantis, and Groot.

Tony and Thor waited for him until the sun set. "Loki's dead." Said Thor passively. "As is all of Asgard. They fought nobly until the end. Oh, and Odin. That was natural, his time came." He had already informed Tony of Vision, Wanda, T'Challa, Bucky, and all the others. Tony barely felt it. The news was only more dirt piled onto the mound where he was trying to bury Peter in his mind.

"How do we keep going?" He asked, not to Thor in particular but more to the dry soil needlessly fertilized by Peter's ashes. Thor was silent. He did not know the answer.

The arrival back to Earth was without fanfare. The soldiers walked the streets of the land they had failed.

_I am the diamond glints in snow. I am the thousand winds that blow._

There were very few individual funerals. No bodies to bury. People collected handfuls of ashes from the streets and took them to the ocean and mountains and cast them into the air. Veins of people dressed in black lined up to the edge of cliffs to scatter the ashes.

Some stood alone. Some of those were children who had never known grief until that moment. They whimpered for their mothers, and parents who had lost their own children took them home.

Tony returned, relieved to find Pepper alive. She tearfully announced that Happy was not. He held her while she cried and didn't tell her about Peter. He didn't tell anyone about Peter. There were no witnesses to hold him accountable, so he selfishly held the truth away. It didn't matter much, anyways. May was gone, too.

And so, he mourned Peter alone. He felt stuck on Titan, trapped by Peter's pleas to help him. “I'm sorry, Mr. Stark,” whispered the breeze that brought one final New York snow storm to the end of April. “No, kid. I'm sorry.” He put on his glasses. "Friday, give me everything you can find on all of the infinity stones."

  _I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain._

By the middle of August, the world had filled in the spaces. The food crisis had certainly halted, with half of the population gone. Weddings started up again, the spots in empty corporations were filled with qualified individuals. But Tony was still not married, and Happy's place in Stark Industries was still not filled. But it wasn't all bad. Pepper wanted to wait on the wedding anyways, and now that there was less of an energy crisis the world didn't depend on Tony to save it.

When Steve showed up at Tony's door, he didn't slam it in his face. Both men were worn, but rested. There hadn't been a physical fight for them in months.

"I hear you're looking for information on infinity stones." Steve announced after minutes of cold silence. "Who did you lose?" He didn't deserve to know. But Tony let it go anyways. "My kid. You met him once. He was the one in the tights."

Steve pursed his lips and nodded. "Let me guess. Died in your arms?" Tony's lack of movement was enough of an answer. "So did Bucky. Can I come in?" Tony stepped aside and gestured in. Steve had a beard, a personal choice judging by how well it was groomed. It was one that Tony did not envy, but admired all the same.

Outside, it started to rain. "Listen. I did some things to get information, and I'll only tell you what I did if you ask. But here's the thing. There might be a chance that we can get everyone back." Steve explained. Tony barely blinked.

"Rogers, we lost. There's no use trying to resurrect a pile of ashes. All of your labors to protect Barnes turned out to be in vain." He didn't say how it was Steve's fault, as much as he wanted to tear into him in exchange for the pain he had caused him for the last three years.

Every time he felt like screaming at someone for how gloriously they had failed the universe, Peter's terrified eyes flashed in his mind. He felt like the kid was in the room with him, staring at him, holding his breath for Tony to explode.

Tony always shoved away his fury, because his fury at himself overcame anything he could have held for anyone else. Steve didn't react either. The coldness between them was too familiar.

"Is that what you tell yourself about Peter?" The sore spot was finally hit. Tony walked back over to the door and opened it, gesturing for Steve to leave. "Well, this has been a nice chat, but you've outstayed your welcome. I don't care who you tortured to get whatever information you wanted to share with me, but I find it hilarious how flexible your moral code is when it's convenient for you. Get out."

Steve obeyed and stepped out of the door. But before he left, he turned around to look at Tony one more time. "I'm sorry, Tony." He muttered. "No, you're not." Tony grunted in response, and he closed the door without a slam.

He waited to talk to Friday until he was sure Steve was gone. The rain fell. "What did you get off of him?" "Exactly what you've been waiting for boss. There was a suspiciously easy to hack flash drive in his pocket. But he's wrong. There's nothing that we can do. All we have to do is wait. The soul stone cannot hold that many souls for a period of time longer than about three-quarters of an Earth year. We must wait until February." And so he did.

_When you awaken in the morning’s hush, I am the soft uplifting rush, of quiet birds circled in flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night._

When Tony woke up from the soundest sleep he had in years and looked out the window, the lightening sky looked black from the number of birds that cast themselves into the air.

It was still dark enough that the winter stars speckled the sky, but the light revealed the forms of the fleeing wings that had returned back to Upstate New York far too early and took refuge in the trees surrounding the compound. Tony would have passed it off as normal if there weren't so many of them. He tapped his chest twice to allow the armor to form over his pajamas and he leapt off of his balcony, narrowly avoiding the birds that choked the air. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he did know that there had to be a reason that the birds needed to escape. They had to be escaping, to remove themselves from the environment so quickly. There might be somebody trying to attack the compound.

"Friday, scan for life signals." He commanded. A moment later, his sensors were flooded with an ever increasing number of human life signals. The number climbed from the hundreds, to the thousands, to the hundred thousands before Tony could even exclaim.

"Friday, are you certain that you aren't getting humans confused with birds?" He murmured, standing until he could figure out what to do next. "Boss, I'm certain. And what's more, the bird population is dropping just as quickly as humans are appearing. Send up a flare through the flock, try to see if there's anything going on.”

Tony did as she said and raised his arm to shoot. Immediately, the red light revealed that the birds were turning to ash. Tony choked, his mind automatically assuming the worst, that now the world's natural resources were disappearing. But his gaze followed the ash, and he saw that it was developing into a consistent stream back to the ground. The night vision the suit provided showed that the ash was developing into human forms, laying on the ground.

He didn't think and rushed toward them, looking for the bodies of anyone he knew. But he didn't know any of them. These people were strangers. But they were alive. One unconscious man shot up from his sleep, heaving for air and sweating profusely despite the crisp February air. Tony let the helmet melt away as he grasped the guy's arms to steady him and provide him some form of human comfort.

"Hey, hey man. You're alright, you're okay. Chill. You're back." The man met eyes with Tony, and he suddenly scrambled closer to him, still borderline hysterical. "He brought us home. He did it, he brought us home. You have to find him, you have to find him. He brought us home."

Tony glanced up for a moment to see that more people were materializing out of the ash, but now the trees themselves were becoming more and more people. "Friday, notify whoever is important enough to be notified about this. I think the population is about to swell up again." At this, the man's face fell. "No, man, no. Not all of us could make it. It was so lonely in there. So lonely. We couldn't make it."

Tony grit his teeth. The man didn't seem like he could answer any questions at the moment, so he instructed him to lie back down. All around him, people continued to materialize. Some woke up. They all said the same thing. "Go find him. He brought us home."

After a few minutes of the same disorienting events, Friday blared to life. "Boss, Barnes just showed up on the radar." Right, the man who unknowingly killed Tony's parents. "Bring me to him." Friday provided Tony with the specs, and he found Barnes within minutes. Unlike the others, Barnes was already standing, looking tired and bewildered as he always did. When his eyes caught on Tony, he looked afraid for a moment, but then sighed and decided to walk towards him. They stood there, staring at one another for a minute, until Tony sighed and extended a hand. Barnes shook it. "I'm glad you're not actually dead, Barnes." Tony confessed. The soldier smirked. "Yeah, you too Stark. I'm sure you've got some questions." "Where were you?" Tony asked. Bucky shook his head, starting to regain some of his composure. "T'Challa said we were in the soul stone. We still don't really know what that means, but hey, we turned to dust, so anything can happen. T'Challa was our leader, kind of. He told us to get together with the people we loved and wait. There was nothing there. Just water and sky. But there were lots of people who were totally alone. We tried to take them into our groups, but it wasn't the same. They kept disappearing. No ash, we would blink and they would be gone. Nothing for them to live for, so they just stopped."

In the distance, Tony heard the thrum of a helicopter coming closer to the compound. "There's backup." He announced. Barnes shook his head. "You're going to need more than that. About a billion of us survived, if I'm guessing. Plenty of people were alone and language barriers did not help. There were even some people from islands that have never been contacted, at first. They got scared and ran away. We didn't see them again." Tony shuddered. They had gotten so many back, but only a quarter of the total losses.

"How did you get back?" Barnes raised an eyebrow at him. "I thought all the people who you just passed would have told you. That annoying Spider Kid of yours figured it out. It was people's love for one another that kept them alive in there. So the kid thought, well, why not use that to go back."

Tony could barely speak. "He's alive?" Barnes chuckled. "He sure is, and he wouldn't shut up about you. You want to know why we all showed up here? Because his healing powers made him strong enough to pull every last person out of that damn stone. We spent a while experimenting how to go about it, and his mind opened up a portal. There was no way to tell whether we would survive the trip, but we went anyways. To open the portal, he thought of someone he loved. And he thought of you. That must be some bond you two have, because he's pulling a billion people back onto earth."

The sun was beginning to rise, showing the crowds of people materializing on the hills. Tony and Bucky waited there for hours, watching as more and more people appeared. Every legal officer possible arrived at the scene, ruining the super secretiveness of the compound.

The ground swarmed with translators for every language darting around to help with every conversation, many of whom had tears in their eyes as they looked around for their lost loved ones. It took a week for the people to stop coming. Every day, they would stop for an hour, then they would start up again.

"The kid's taking a break." Chuckled Bruce. He had flown in as fast as he could when he heard the news. "You can hardly blame him." Steve sighed. "He's more of a hero than any of us." The people came in a couple hundred million at a time, and the whole world was working to make sure they got home.

It had been an extraordinary week of unity among previously divided nations, the collective human experience transcended language and culture. The people who came were very tired, and got ravenously hungry within an hour of their return. Food stations paid for by the world governments were stationed across the land. Never before had rice and beans tasted so good.

Soon, more people that Tony knew began to arrive. Wanda came jogging up to them and was received with emotional hugs all around. Her eyes still flitted the crowd, hoping for Vision, as did Thor's wishing for Loki. Steve and Bucky clapped Sam on the shoulder and exchanged some snarky jokes that only soldiers could understand. When Groot, Quill, Mantis, Gamora, and Drax approached Rocket, they all broke down at the same time. Groot wrapped them into a leafy hug until Quill complained that someone's elbow was digging into his side. "Shut up and enjoy the moment. I've waited eight months for this." Snapped Rocket.

Finally, Strange arrived. "T'Challa has the kid. He did it. He saved us all." Tony tightly hugged the man. "You stayed with him?" He nearly sobbed. "I would never leave." Strange replied, shaking Tony's shoulders in affirmation.

T'Challa came, holding Peter in his arms. Tony ran to meet them. "He's exhausted." T'Challa explained, setting the boy on the ground. "But he has every right to be."

The Iron Spider suit was broken off in places, revealing his old suit underneath. The helmet was removed, showing Peter's tired eyes struggling to stay open.

"Tony..." he breathed. Tony snatched his hand. "I'm here, kid. You did good. You did so good. You're a hero, kid." Tony couldn't even stop the tears anymore. They streamed down his face and neck unapologetically.

Peter smiled, then fell asleep. Tony carried him inside to the room he had set aside for when he was older.

"Rest well, kid." He murmured, shutting off the light and closing the door. Then he went and slept, too.

_Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die._


End file.
